At irregular intervals I visited Ramallah to buy Ha’aretz, a newspaper of which Israel should be proud. And there it was my privilege to meet Raja Shehadeh, the Palestinians’ best known English-language writer whose five (so far) volumes of personal memoirs are dual purpose: as literature exhilarating, as aids to understanding The Problem indispensable. In time I became quite reliant on Raja’s stabilising blend of humour, imagination, courage, shrewdness, common sense and sympathy. Sometimes we were joined by his American wife Penny, who radiates her own sort of calming cheerfulness. As an academic activist, she came to the West Bank for a year in 1982, met Raja and is still on the West Bank. Few foreigners have shared in the Palestinians’ sufferings for so long.

Raja’s office in the town centre, where he works as a lawyer, is soothingly predictable: a mellow Persian carpet, dark glossy furniture, shelves of sober tomes. He sits at his father’s and grandfather’s desk – a small, slim, soft-spoken man, diffident yet steely. At our first meeting, when I commented on Ramallah’s death-dealing traffic chaos, he assured me that it was much reduced: not a trivial achievement, it went with a general restoration of civic order. Also, the PA was trying to lay the foundations for an honest justice system, without which no society can enjoy good health. He went on to explain one of the ways in which the settlements ‘have damaged Israel as a viable state’. For any state to endure, its legal system, whether good or bad, must be generally accepted by the majority of citizens. They may complain and protest about its defects but if they get away with consistently breaking the law, in open defiance of court rulings, the validity of the state itself is brought into question. All the more so when the armed forces, and many politicians and some judges, collude with the lawbreakers in various ways, directly and indirectly. Not long before, several judges had pronounced certain settlements to be illegal according to Israeli law: then they blatantly advised the settlers on how to evade the relevant laws by using obscure loopholes. In the OPT five legal systems coexist: Ottoman, British, Mandatory, Jordanian, Israeli Military Rule and Israeli Administrative law. To lay ears this sounds like a stray dog’s dinner. When I said as much, Raja rang his aged uncle, internationally recognised as the leading authority on this issue, to clarify certain points. Then he assured me that in practice confusion rarely arises. To those with the knowledge and skill to wriggle around, over, under or through the various layers, it’s all quite clear-cut. The Ottoman component remains extremely important and is routinely manipulated to the Palestinians’ disadvantage.

Raja was a sixteen-year-old in 1967 when the Occupation began with a distribution, throughout the Territories, of notices in Arabic and Hebrew: ‘The Israel Defense Forces are entering the area today and taking over control and the maintenance of security and civil order’. Soon Zionist politicians and army chiefs were talking about ‘the administration of liberated territories’; ‘occupation’ and ‘conquest’ had the wrong flavour for the international menu. Long before the Six-Day War, in 1961, Judge Advocate Meir Shamgar, the IDF’s highest legal authority – and soon to be the strongest legal champion of Gush Emunim – had begun to plan ‘the operation of the IDF in neighbouring countries as a result of war’. To train future operatives, special courses were held, based on the experience gained during the period of military rule (October 1948–December 1966) over the Palestinians still resident in Israel.

By the time Raja returned from his studies in London to devil in his father’s office, countless military orders had been promulgated on the West Bank. He was asked to prepare a subject index of those orders and immediately realised with what cunning skill the IDF legal unit had contrived to maintain an aggressive occupation while evading the duties of an occupying power – including the obligation to protect private property, an obligation scrupulously fulfilled on the West Bank when Jordan was sovereign.

The 1949 Armistice agreements, between Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, had left the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) under King Abdullah’s rule. When His Majesty unilaterally annexed it in April 1950 only Britain and Pakistan recognised this move and Jordan passed no new legislation relating to the Palestinians’ territory. For Israel to recognise Jordanian law (rooted in Ottoman law) on the West Bank, despite that unilateral annexation, was illogical but politically expedient. The ignoring of Article 2 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (deplored by several Israeli legal scholars) was justified on the grounds that to accept the applicability of the Convention would be to concede that the West Bank and Gaza Strip belonged to Jordan and Egypt – though the OPT, before the Zionist occupation, had not been under the sovereignty of a side to the Convention. Israel also denied the applicability of the 1907 Hague Regulations which deal with military rule over the land of ‘an enemy state’. In the late 1980s Israel’s Supreme Court went through a series of mind-boggling contortions to exclude the sovereignty issue from future legal deliberations.

As a newly registered lawyer, Raja attended the shabby Nablus court and remembered being called by an ancient who, in Mandatory times, had served with his grandfather, Saleem Shehadeh, for many years a district court judge. He was now seeing, close up, the sufferings being relentlessly inflicted on most Palestinians by the Occupation. Yet no one was protesting … So he set about founding Al-Haq, a non-profit-making organisation originally known as Law in the Service of Man. Modelled on ‘Justice’, the British section of the International Commission of Jurists, it monitors legal conditions under Occupation and tries to promote the rule of law. Raja’s co-founders were two lawyer friends, a Lebanese-American Yale graduate and an American Jew, both keen to donate their knowledge and skills to the Palestinian cause.

That was in 1979. Thirty years later Raja and I were agreed on the futility of much contemporary human rights campaigning. In his most recent book, Occupation Diaries, the founder of Al-Haq sadly admits:

We also agreed that sick Israel cannot survive as at present constituted, a reality that is becoming apparent to an increasing number of thinking Israelis. For all concerned, the reincarnation process will be slow and painful but the end result has to be an improvement on the Holy Land as we now know it. While I daydreamed about the one-state solution, Raja looked ahead to a twenty-second-century federation of Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, an entity bearing some family resemblance to the second-century AD Roman province of Syria-Palaestina. To me this was a new idea and immediately I liked it (though not as much as Palrael). Such a federation would certainly be less artificial than the imperialists’ imposition of ‘statehood’ on Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, Lebanon, Transjordan and Libya.

As the weeks passed I benefited from Raja’s sensitivity to the OPT’s political and social undercurrents, those minuscule changes happening in the depths when it seemed on the surface nothing was changing – or ever could. Since the Shehadehs’ enforced departure from Jaffa in ’48 they have been an inconspicuous but important part of OPT life, as lawyers rather than politicians. Raja’s father, Aziz, was among the notables who in 1967 advocated a version of the two-state solution. A day before the ceasefire, he met with David Kimche of Mossad to argue for an autonomous Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, in federation with either Jordan or Israel. Kimche then took the political temperature on the West Bank and found wide support for an agreement with Israel rather than a return to Jordanian rule. At once he urged his government to declare a Palestinian state, before the conquered territories had time to organise resistance to their occupier. But the moderate nationalists’ insistence on East Jerusalem being under Palestinian sovereignty, and recognised as the new state’s capital, was adroitly used by those who meant to keep their grip on Eretz Israel. A few notables, led by Aziz Shehadeh and Anwar Nussiebeh, continued doggedly to campaign for independence but already a militant movement, soon to be known as the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation), was evolving. In February 1968 the Israelis arrested a Palestinian who had been sent from Jordan by Arafat to assassinate Aziz as a traitor prepared to give Palestinian land to the Zionists. Yet a mere six years later Arafat implicitly accepted partition in his speech to the 1974 UN General Assembly.

On 2 December 1985 – a dark, cold, foggy evening – Aziz was murdered, with a sharp knife, on his own doorstep by a Palestinian never formally identified but known to be a collaborator who could rely on immunity. It was presumed that a personal grievance had motivated the murder. So much for law and order under military rule.

In October 1991 the Madrid Conference opened. ‘A historic breakthrough!’ exclaimed the international media, putty as always in Zionist hands. Raja, as the Palestinian team’s legal adviser, quickly became disillusioned and went home. Unwittingly the Palestinians were playing the Zionist game: prolonging the talks to prolong the Occupation to prolong the settlers’ expansion time. Soon the Madrid talks were moved to Washington where, over the next two years, nine sessions achieved nothing.

Meanwhile, in Oslo, the Accords were being secretly brewed. The Palestinian delegation, led by Ahmed Qurei’a (aka Abu Ala, later a PA prime minister) and Mahmoud Abbas (aka Abu Mazen), lacked any appropriately qualified legal adviser, much less an international contract lawyer of Raja’s calibre, under whose aegis the Accords would not have happened. Raja describes them as ‘the most shameful and damaging agreements the Palestinians could possibly have made with Israel’.

To compound the Accords’ other inequities, they cleared the way for a Palestinian/Qatari consortium to destroy Raja’s beloved hills north of Ramallah. As we spoke, ancient terraced olive groves were being acquired, cut-price, as the site of a new city (Rawabi) to house 25,000 Palestinians. If farmers refused to sell their land it was confiscated by the PA who were, in Raja’s words, ‘competing with the Israelis to see who could do most damage in the shortest time’. Two other housing projects, visually replicating the hated settlements, were being built on valuable public land presented by Arafat to a few of his cronies. Also, a Palestine Investment Fund project had made available, at public expense, leisure amenities for the enjoyment of the elite. The housing shortage is of course artificial. Area C offers ample space if only people were allowed to build around its villages instead of being condemned to live in Rawabi’s high-rise blocks. Apologists for Oslo (a shrinking minority) often refer to Northern Ireland’s ‘Development and Investment for Peace’. Why not copy that on the West Bank? Create jobs and exports, create ‘growth’ by offering bank loans … It doesn’t take long to silence those apologists. The reasons ‘why not’ are numerous and cogent.

Raja sees his parents as belonging to the Nakba generation, himself to the Naksah generation and present-day youngsters to the Oslo generation ‘with its heavy toll of defeat disguised as victory and its measure of false glamour’.

That ‘false glamour’ was not yet polluting Nablus but in Ramallah it has long since taken over. On 27 December 1995, when the IDF handed Area A over to the PA, this town became the Palestinians’ de facto capital as a result of Arafat’s signing ‘the worst surrender document in Palestinian history’. (Raja’s words.) Then international aid flooded in, accompanied by foreign diplomats, INGOs and UN agencies needing luxury hotels, pricey restaurants, cocktail bars, nightclubs and cinemas. I was at once reminded of all those Third World (archaic phrase!) capitals where overpaid expats live in affluent ghettoes, and superfluous buildings absorb funding urgently needed for schools, clinics, housing. The PA’s ostentatious multi-storey Ministry of Finance (a stage for unquantifiable dirty deeds) is only one of Ramallah’s many shameless architectural excesses.

Sometimes I took the 7.00 a.m. bus to Ramallah, a vehicle noted for its wheezy engine, torn seats, filthy windows and friendly passengers. Twice, I sat with a Balata neighbour, a young PA civil servant who didn’t foresee a third Intifada. ‘People are too tired and hopeless, only wanting survival.’ Before 2000, 40% of Balatan men worked in Israel; a trickle were now being allowed back but only seven or eight per cent of those who applied for permits received them. The rest had to evade the Barrier and so were paid even less than before; often that evasion was organised by their Israeli employers. On the bus this near neighbour chatted happily, yet within the camp, if our paths were about to cross, he went the other way. On his home ground it doubtless seemed wise for a PA employee to avoid an International who mixed with all sorts. At that time the tensions were such that Balatans who conversed casually with outsiders could be mistaken for collaborators and I had been warned that a minority of hardliners distrusted me. My claim to be a writer gathering material did not reassure; to them a writer is a journalist and journalists don’t live in Balata. I might well be a spy and the friends I made, those who in time came to confide in me, were probably put on a ‘to be watched’ list.

To some of my neighbours Hamas seemed a major threat, likely to bring more misery on them as the Border Police and IDF hunted those suspected of being Hamas supporters. In fact most camp militants were in al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, Fatah’s undercover militia. During the peak suicide-bombing period – the first two years of the second Intifada – Palestinians despatched 145 killers: 52 from Hamas, 40 from Fatah, 35 from Islamic Jihad, the rest freelancers.

At first I remained on the fence between Fatah and Hamas, feeling uneasy about the latter’s roots in radical /fundamentalist Islam. My Hamas friends in Nablus professed to abhor the sinister, perverted versions of Islam promoted by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. However, those friends did point out that the international reaction to Hamas’ 2006 election victory had made it much easier for ‘mad mullahs’ to recruit from among the hopeless, humiliated youngsters imprisoned – apparently for life – in the OPT. Having seen a ‘free and fair’ election being rubbished by the most vocal purveyors of democracy, and heard their party being discredited as ‘terrorists’ with whom ‘we’ cannot talk, many reacted to their ‘criminalisation’ by turning away from the ballot box and dwelling on alternatives.

I never cease to marvel at the sheer obtuseness of the Rich World’s leaders.

Towards the end of my ‘camp experience’ I came off the fence, acknowledging that the Fatah-dominated PA had done nothing to earn my neutrality. Money talks as loudly in the Holy Land as elsewhere and Fatah had listened attentively. If they went along with the occupiers, lavish funding would continue to flow in their direction while Hamas was deprived of all support. It is too easy to bring to heel people demoralised by decades of poverty, military repression and thwarted hopes. Hence the horrible spectacle of armed Palestinian security forces collaborating with Zionists to eliminate Hamas – or anyone else out of favour with ‘the international community’.

I spent one Friday afternoon in Ramallah drinking mint tea with three Palestinian Authority Security Force (PASF) recruits, young men newly uneasy about their role. (One spoke fluent English, courtesy of the Dayton Mission, the US-funded training centre.) Having visualised themselves serving in the army of an independent Palestine they now suspected PASF of morphing into a mere IDF-support paramilitary force. And ‘independence’ seemed to be receding … The mutual friend behind our meeting had vouched for my discretion so they spoke openly. Having grown up together in a militant community where Dayton dollars were not an acceptable excuse for joining PASF, they were now outcasts and finding their PASF comrades inadequate substitutes for family. Listening to all this, I heard echoes from the Irish past when a young man who joined the Royal Irish Constabulary (a colonial police service) might arouse the occasionally lethal hatred of his nationalist neighbours. I could think of nothing comforting to say to my politically naïve companions, now so angry with themselves for having been deceived by the vague but exciting promise of army service in an independent Palestine. I asked, ‘Do many share your disillusionment?’ The reply – ‘We don’t talk about it.’ Plainly they felt trapped. IDF refuseniks may be scorned by their communities and serve short jail sentences; Palestinians who have second thoughts could be in a far more dangerous situation, equally mistrusted by the Israelis and by unforgiving elements within their own communities.

In Balata (and it would be the same in those young men’s home town) Dayton was blamed for training Palestinians to use peculiarly vicious torture techniques. None of my neighbours understood that the PA’s CIA-trained intelligence agencies and the newer Dayton-trained PASF were separate enterprises, both undesirable but the former demonstrably more so than the latter. The CIA’s apparently limitless funding empowers it to corrupt a wide range of people in any population. As Professor Yezid Sayig records in a Carnegie Paper (‘Fixing Broken Windows’):

Condoleezza Rice, when Secretary of State, proclaimed – ‘In relation to Israel-Palestine, democratic development is at the centre of our approach.’ But you don’t promote democracy – or security or prosperity – by equipping and training men to spy on and kill one another. By now this fake zeal for ‘democratic development’ is past its sell-by date. Everywhere, younger generations are noting the contradiction when Pentagon spokespersons announce yet again their determination to dominate the world by military means.

As President Bush (Jnr) sat in the White House surrounded by Zionist advisers, devising his foredoomed Road Map, how aware was he of the nature and extent of Gush Emunim/NRP power? The ensuing shambles suggests total unawareness. In 2004 he accepted the permanence of the major illegal settlements, then made irrelevant demands for a ‘ten-month freeze’ – irrelevant because what he had already condoned has left the West Bank so fractured there cannot be a viable, independent Palestinian state. Yet few mainstream media commentators made this obvious point – had they got lost in a hasbara-manufactured fog? Would Israeli public opinion, if not itself disorientated by the same fog, have allowed the extremists’ alliance to gain so much power?

In a ramshackle, four-table eating-house near Ramallah’s taxi terminus I enjoyed hummus and falafel breakfasts and some interesting conversations. One young Christian Palestinian sociologist said his family ‘have lived forever’ in Ramallah but now he longed to emigrate – if only some foreigner would sponsor him! He asserted, ‘Israel has to collapse, it’s founded on a fantasy. But that won’t happen soon and I need a job!’ He saw Cast Lead as having marked a stage in the ‘collapse’. The demos it inspired internationally were, he believed, ‘a sign millions are rejecting Israeli propaganda. They see Zionists taking everything and giving nothing, then expecting support for war crimes because they’re Jews! Friends in Europe tell me everyone’s tired of this Holocaust guilt-trip, won’t go on it any more. It’s history, no part of their emotional scene, not their baggage. Israel is flogging a dead camel.’

On another visit, Ramallah showed its positive aspect when I entered a wood-panelled coffee-shop before realising it was male territory. As I hesitated, the young man behind the gently gurgling coffee-pots smiled and extended a hand and in English invited me to be seated. A dozen not young men were relaxing in deep horsehair armchairs, contentedly sipping coffee and bubbling their variously flavoured narghiles. A few were playing cards or shesh-besh (backgammon) by the golden glow of wall-lamps. Everyone wore conventional business suits and highly polished shoes. There was no background muzak, no TV and no conversation until a long-legged man with an aquiline nose courteously asked me, ‘Where from? What purpose?’

When I had told him, Dr Natsheh introduced himself. He was a medical doctor, a Christian, educated at Ramallah’s famous Quaker school, a life-long pacifist and one of those easy people who don’t feel an hors d’oeuvre of small talk is necessary before strangers get down to the main course. He was troubled by the thought that only violence keeps the OPT on the international agenda. Like many Palestinians, he looked back on the first Intifada as an opportunity missed – by the Zionists. Had they not responded violently to a well-thought-out, non-violent strategy, some compromise would have been possible then – the sort no longer possible, given so many more festering grievances.

Dr Natsheh recalled that ‘in the ’70s the Hamas leadership concentrated on preaching and social work. One day Allah would make everything OK, if Muslims didn’t modernise or use violence. That changed after 1980, when Military Order 854 made the military governor a tyrant and we saw more IDF cruelty with more impunity. The order was meant to block the growth of an autonomous civil society, but in fact resisting it was good training for the first Intifada. Then our resistance gained international support and the military governor’s power was lessened.’

Dr Natsheh brought out the latest Palestine Monitor Factbook:

Then he said what I have so often thought. ‘It’s hard to be a pacifist on the West Bank. For over sixty years Zionists have been murdering unarmed Palestinian civilians like some people shoot pigeons. Two wrongs can’t make a right but one wrong can seem to justify another.’

I mentioned a recent argument with a middle-aged Balatan who couldn’t accept that there was such a thing as an innocent Israeli victim. Did I not know that all Jewish citizens of the State of Israel condone, to some degree, the dispossession of the Palestinians? Could I not see that Zionism’s US-funded military machine leaves guerrilla tactics as the only show of power available to Palestinians? This man (a Nakba baby, born in July 1948) wouldn’t concede that expertly indoctrinated Israelis cannot be held fully responsible for crimes committed by their government. Nor did he want to hear about the many Israelis who have jeopardised their careers in defence of Palestinian rights. He held fast to his central point. The Zionists have decreed that violence should be the name of the game.

Dr Natsheh nodded. ‘True – if things go too calm provocateurs are paid to stir it. The Zionists know nothing else. They had to establish their state through violence – how else secure a “homeland” on others’ territory? Fudging this is a major obstacle, now, to peacemaking.’

Walking along Rukab Street, our minds revolved, like hamsters on a wheel, round and round the question that has been puzzling millions for decades. How has it been possible so thoroughly to indoctrinate the majority of Israelis?

‘Surely,’ said Dr Natsheh, ‘they need to submit to the process, need to believe in their creation myth to cancel out everything that’s gone wrong – yes?’

‘Maybe,’ I replied, feeling the answer must be more complicated.

In a small smoke-filled café in neighbouring al-Bireh, near the meagre twelfth-century Ayyubid Khan ruins, I waited for Karim’s friend Hassan – an ex-prisoner, like 40% of the present OPT male population.

In the week after the Cast Lead ceasefire more than 120 Hamas sympathisers were detained on the West Bank. Among them was Hassan, a thirty-year-old journalist who had suffered two periods of administrative detention during the second Intifada. His recent arrest was a typical IDF operation. After midnight a squad fired a few shots at his village home, smashed the front door, vandalised two rooms, made him strip naked on the public street, then removed him to one of Israel’s five detention centres, leaving his family not knowing where he was or for how long. Within the 1967 borders there are also 21 prisons, 4 interrogation centres and one secret interrogation facility said to be furnished with state-of-the-art ‘enhancement tools’ donated by the CIA. In February 2009 there were 9,493 prisoners, 349 aged eighteen or less, 75 women.

This time Hassan was lucky. Having been charged with making a pro-Hamas comment on a local radio station, he was held for 55 hours in a cell without chair or bed. No food was provided, only three cups of tea per diem. But nobody beat him up – and suddenly he found himself free. Later I heard rumours that an entrepreneurial uncle of his, and a senior PA official and a junior IDF officer, formed a triumvirate associated with car smuggling, the sale of permits and the ‘fixing’ of land sales. Ramallah reverberates with such rumours, some no doubt based on fact.

After his release, while sitting in the back of a jeep awaiting transport to Qalandia, Hassan observed a four-man EU delegation being given permission to photograph a ragged, dirty, long-bearded man, shackled and blindfolded outside his cell; to some urban eyes he could seem quite menacing. The visitors were told this terrorist had been caught trying to bring explosives through the Barrier. When they had departed with their photographs the ‘terrorist’ was freed to join Hassan in the jeep. He had been arrested the day before and beaten up for having allowed his sheep to stray onto settlers’ land – land grazed by Palestinians’ flocks since before the Turks left Central Asia. Hassan had the impression the Europeans were not naive enough to boast about their encounter with a captured terrorist.

It’s hard for those unacquainted with the OPT fully to appreciate what military occupation means. Outsiders glimpse it in action only when violence becomes ‘news’. Having to live every day in the permanent yet arbitrary shadow of 1500 military orders is a special sort of living hell and not newsworthy. Most foreign residents assemble a checkpoint anthology and some pages of my diary resemble an INGO ‘Report on IDF Abuses’ – horrifying yet monotonous. Below I offer a representative selection.

Before the present permit system was introduced in 1987, followed in 1993 by the checkpoint system, it took forty minutes to drive from Hebron to Ramallah. Now, the settlement-avoiding Hebron– Bethlehem–Ramallah route can take two hours and ten minutes.

One afternoon, at the main checkpoint between Bethlehem and Ramallah, collecteeves (minibuses) were being stopped for their seven passengers’ ID cards and permits to be slowly scrutinised. One university student was extracted from each of the six vehicles in our queue. For half-an-hour these young men had to stand, with arms outstretched, facing a high wire-mesh fence overlooking the austerely beautiful Judean Hills. As the IDF made much of checking their documents most passengers got out and stood around observing the scene impassively – while I loudly expressed my rage. Then, studying the others’ expressions and body-language, I recognised in some a rage exceeding my own but rigorously controlled.

Our vehicle’s victim was Jamal, an engineering student, son of a surgeon at a Hebron hospital, well known to a fellow-passenger who angrily told me, ‘He’s no sort of activist!’ The six students were made to stand immobile, arms raised and extended; anyone who moved was shouted at abusively. When the documents were returned Jamal was ordered to present himself to the Big Man of the regional police, near Hebron, within seven days. As he rejoined us I asked what would happen if he didn’t present himself.

‘They’d come to get him,’ replied a professor. ‘And probably vandalise his home as punishment and perhaps give him six months in administrative detention. Don’t you wonder – if someone is seen as a security threat, why let him go on his way?’

Think on’t – six taxis, each delayed for 50 minutes while these students were being humiliated. Again I felt sickened by the young soldiers’ enjoyment of such rituals. Also I felt frightened, not personally but at a deep collective level. We know to where such institutionalised inhumanity can lead. Avigdor Lieberman, when Israel’s Deputy Prime Minister, referred to the release of Palestinian detainees and said, ‘It would be better to drown these prisoners, in the Dead Sea if possible, since that’s the lowest point in the world.’

How could this abuse, occurring throughout the OPT six days a week (most conscripts go home for the Sabbath), not provoke a third Intifada? And while these exposures of young Palestinian men’s impotence fester within another generation, the courageous IDF men who ‘break the silence’ are ignored or reviled.

In Area B, under Palestinian civil control, seat-belts are optional and most passengers mark the transition from IDF-controlled Area C by unclipping. This wordless action might seem insignificant but feels quite powerful when all a vehicle’s passengers simultaneously unclip. The prudence of doing so is another matter. Most of the OPT’s super-skilful drivers are speed-addicted and competitive (few have access to sports grounds) and narrow escapes are frequent. However, while loyally unclipping I reckoned a belt wouldn’t make much difference in a head-on collision at 70 mph.

On re-entering Area C, drivers usually remind passengers not to risk an unreasonable penalty. In al-Yasmeen I met an indignant elderly returnee from Canada whose daughter commuted by collecteeve to Birzeit University. When charged with being unbelted she refused to pay the 90 shekel fine, arguing that one can’t wear a broken belt. She was then blacklisted and during the previous year had been unable to cross the Allenby Bridge because of her ‘criminal record’.

The early serveeces to Ramallah were always packed with men due on their work sites by 8.00 a.m. One morning at Tappuah checkpoint, where an Apartheid road begins, we were ordered out and delayed for 35 minutes while a dog-handler trained her explosive-seeking Alsatian. Tappuah, one of the most rabidly lawless settlements, has its own road-block, CCTV, high electronic fence and heavily armed private security guards in sentry-boxes. It doesn’t need a protective IDF road-block. As we stood silently by the roadside a soldier strolled to and fro, smirking, relishing the frustration of workers worrying about being late. Beside me stood a Nablusi teacher of English who couldn’t find affordable lodgings in aid-rich Ramallah. He said, ‘We’re used to this treatment. It’s better to stay calm, they think it’s funny if we get angry.’ Like many other forces, the IDF often use dogs to terrorise and everywhere it enrages me to see dogs or horses being abused to complement human nastiness. (Drug-squad spaniels employed at sea-or airports are another matter, always looking eager and happy, tails wagging as they sniff hopefully.)

That afternoon, on my way home, I saw two youths being arrested at Huwwara: handcuffed, blindfolded, flung roughly into a jeep and driven off to the nearby prison hut. Witnesses told me a few youths had stoned soldiers during the 1.00 p.m. ‘changing of the guard’, when conscripts walk from a jeep to their sentry-boxes. As the stoners merged into scores of passengers, toing and froing amidst taxis and minibuses, the off-duty unit arrested two other youths who had nothing whatever to do with the attack. It’s unfortunate that this whole region, like much of the Holy Land, is strewn with large, sharp stones as though Nature, aeons ago, had foreseen the Palestinians’ liking for such missiles. On hearing of this incident one of my neighbours gloomily diagnosed the start of another feud: stoners’ family versus innocents’ family.

Mid-morning was a quiet time at Huwwara. One cold foggy queue-free day two youths stood ahead of me, each carrying a large sealed cardboard carton displaying a colourful picture of the contents – biscuits. A black girl soldier ordered them to open the cartons, peered in, then ripped them up with a bayonet she happened to have handy, scattering the contents on the ground. As the boys struggled to gather dozens of small slippery packets, and secure them in the damaged cartons, their tricky task caused the conscript much amusement. Giggling, she called her Russian mate to come and watch. Luckily my capacious waterproof jacket served as a sack which the boys carried to their granny’s huxter stall not far down the road, in Huwwara village.

I was, at that time, on my way to Birzeit University, a long sharp thorn in Zionist flesh ever since its foundation in 1972 by Musa Nasir, a Palestinian Christian notable and former Jordanian Foreign Minister. He dreamed of a mini-American University of Beirut but his dream couldn’t come true; the occupiers disapproved. ‘It is good for us if the Arabs are hewers of wood and drawers of water’ – so said the official then in charge of OPT education.

Between 1979 and 1992, the IDF kept Birzeit closed 75% of the time, a collective punishment damaging the academic careers of thousands. During that period two faculty members, Sameer Shehadeh and Izzat Ghazzawi, were tortured by Zionist interrogators. Another, of whom I had first heard from my amateur archaeologist friends in Balata, was assassinated. Dr Albert Glock, a US archaeologist, began life as a Christian fundamentalist missionary but at Birzeit was converted to Palestinian nationalism and realised how adroitly Zionism had been misrepresenting archaeological evidence for hasbara’s sake. He was killed by a gunman near Birzeit in 1992, while writing a book about the more than 400 Palestinian villages depopulated and then bulldozed in 1948. His researches, if published, would have reinforced the refugees’ legal case against the State of Israel. The Glock family and their Palestinian friends thought they knew who had paid the assassin.

The university is in Area A, ostensibly an autonomous zone, yet the military still control all access roads. As our collecteeve crossed a high, cloud-wrapped ridge the driver’s phone rang. If Arabic has four-letter words he then used them; ahead lay a flying checkpoint, a temporary road-block set up at random for an unspecified time and therefore extra-disruptive. Soon we were descending from the busy little town of Birzeit, about a mile north of the campus, and could see the IDF deployed where the university’s private road meets the highway. The students were on strike, protesting against a steep rise in fees. At the checkpoint our driver consulted with his passengers. I opted to get out, the rest chose to continue to Ramallah – a few miles further on – via some détour that would add half an hour to their journey.

The university stands alone overlooking a landscape reverently described by Raja in Palestinian Walks but changed beyond recognition since his early hikes in the 1970s. One can’t recommend Palestine/Israel as a holiday destination; the Palestinians’ sufferings and the landscape’s despoliation complement each other.

I pulled up my jacket hood and walked slowly towards the Birzeit pole-barrier and sentry boxes. There was no demo, only a score of angry-looking young men – all muffled up, hands in pockets – hanging around beyond the barrier glaring at a half-dozen PA police who glared back. When I sought an English-speaker everyone glared at me – silently. I showed my academic friend’s card but it was impatiently waved away. A policeman snapped something in Arabic which made his mates laugh. I scanned the students’ faces and, seeing no smile, turned back to the main road just as two ill-advised English tourists were getting into trouble at the checkpoint. Their self-drive car had a yellow Israeli number plate and a GPS security gadget which signalled ‘Stolen Vehicle!’ when they entered Area C. I watched them showing their passports and pleading ignorance of Military Orders. One conscript barked at them in Hebrew, another radioed for instructions before ordering them to leave the car, load their luggage into a taxi, return to Jerusalem and report to the car-hire office. When I tried to talk to them a tall blond soldier with a French accent told me to get lost, then added that I shouldn’t be wandering around on foot. I told him to get lost before strolling away through the fog towards Birzeit town.

I did have one agreeable Huwwara experience. Going through at a quiet time (10-ish), I realised that I had forgotten my passport. To a beautiful raven-haired girl soldier I whispered, ‘Will you please let me through? Promise I’ll be back by sunset!’ At once she smiled, winked and nodded. I wished we could have talked and relaxed together, but it wouldn’t do for a Balata resident to be seen fraternising with the IDF. Meanwhile, on the men’s side, a boy was being vigorously searched by two yelling soldiers. I had seen him walking ahead of me, carrying nothing. Now he was being made to stand facing a sentry-box wall with arms extended. Normally I would have lingered to observe developments but on that occasion I was in no position to annoy our military masters.